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The Tercentenary 
of Henry Vaughan 



BY 

H. W. WELLS 



APRIL 17, 1922 



The Tercentenary 
of Henry Vaughan 



BY 

H. W. WELLS 



APRIL 17, 1922 

Hudson Press 

New York 



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GLORIA MISERERE 



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THE TERCENTENARY 

of 
HENRY VAUGHAN 




ENRY VAUGHAN holds a peculiar and an emin- 
ent place among English devotional poets. He is 
a poet of profound imagination and of a simple 
but rigorous and synthetic religious philosophy. 
Let his position be stated as briefly as possible. 
His worship is characterized above all else by 
a burning realization that our knowledge of divine things rests only 
on intimations. He holds that Nature and personal independence 
are of supreme importance for devotion. And finally he retains 
a catholic faith in simplicity, innocence and shame, and in man's 
right to his highest pleasure. These are the ideas on which 
Vaughan builds a severely impersonal synthesis which should win 
him a commanding place in the history of religious thought. His 
art like his philosophy is at the same time radical and conservative, 
foreshadowing Romantic freedom and wonder, and holding fast to 
the virtues of classical tradition. The poet's life is a valuable 
comment on his thought, and may be sketched chiefly in this con- 
nection. 

The present year is his tercentenary. He was born on April 
17, 1622, in Brecknockshire, a county of southern Wales included 
in the Roman district of Siluria. Hence his fondness for calling 
himself the Silurist. His race is in fact of the first importance, for 
both his high poetic enthusiasm and his mystical and religious love 
of nature belong to the poetic tradition of the Celt. The fire of 
Vaughan is Celtic. He was brought up in a Welsh village. 

At the age of seventeen he went to Oxford. Although his own 
poems are singularly free from literary allusions, he evidently had 
an excellent classical training, and from the rigor of his own 
thought we are not surprised to hear that he "studied logicals un- 
der a noted tutor." From the University his father sent him to 
London to study the municipal law. And here we encounter a bio- 



4 The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 

graphical fact of only less significance for his art than his Welsh 
birth. If his poems are at heart in the Welsh spirit, they are writ- 
ten under the discipline but without the affectations of the lyric 
art of Jonson and Donne. The Celt is too often unrestrained in his 
emotions, and vague and diffuse in his expression. Vaughan ac- 
quired in a literary companionship in London with followers of 
Jonson and Donne a sense unsurpassed in his own age for the 
disciplines of art. His verse is stripped of all superfluities, grace- 
ful without weakness and strong without rudeness. Celtic expan- 
siveness is compressed into unwonted power. The poet sits in com- 
mand above a simple poetic idea and orders it into perfect form. 
In Vaughan's* first verses, which are secular and occasional, a 
Juvenalian scorn and Horatian praise of simplicity and country 
living are crude anticipations of the profound religious attitude of 
the poet's later years. From his early practice in secular verse he 
enjoyed with Herrick and Donne a training missed by Traherne 
and Herbert. Vaughan published his first verses at the age of 
twenty-four. 

His attitude during the Civil Wars is of much value to us for 
an understanding of his thought. Details are missing, but the situ- 
ation is in all its essentials clear. "Soon after," writes Anthony a 
Wood, "the Civil War beginning, to the horror of all good men he 
was sent home, followed the pleasant paths of poetry and philology, 
became noted for his ingenuity, and published several specimens 
thereof, of which his Olor Iscanus was most valued. Afterwards 
applying his mind to the study of physic, became at length eminent 
in his own country for the practice thereof, and was esteemed by 
scholars an ingenius person, but proud and humorous." In The Men 
of War and Abel's Blood, Vaughan takes the position of Christian 
non-resistance. His elegy to "R. W." suggests that he was on the bat- 
tlefields. He was generally sympathetic with the royalist cause. It 
has been suggested that he was a physician in the royalist forces. 
However this may be, his reluctance to take part in the wars scan- 
dalized his learned biographer, and probably his own friends. But 
the young Vaughan was proud and humorous in two senses not in- 
tended in the biographical notice. Vaughan's poems show him proud 
only before the proud, but humble before the humble and before 
what he conceived as the divine will. And he had too much shrewd, 
elfin humor to be disturbed by the horror of alj good men. Vaughan 
neither feared the frowns nor loved the smiles of greatness. 



The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 5 

The first edition of his principal work, the Silex Scintillans, 
or Sparkling Flint, was published in 1650, or in the poet's twenty- 
eighth year. A second edition containing as many poems again, of 
equal merit and similar intent, appeared in 1655. 

What manner of life Vaughan led during the forty years in 
which he was a doctor among the Welsh peasants may best be dis- 
covered in his own verse. Though this verse is for the most part 
seraphically free from personality, it contains for one who will read 
carefully from a biographical viewpoint an adequate picture of the 
poet's impersonal, unselfish and devout living. His life was one of 
service spent among the hill towns. The Holy Spirit was ever pre- 
sent to him in nature, Christ in activity. Saturated in a rich ideal, 
his life became to a most unusual degree the embodiment of an 
idealistic philosophy. To discuss one is to discuss the other. With 
quiet inspiration John Brown in his Home Subsecivae has read 
Vaughan's life between the lines of his verse. "Though what Sir 
Walter Scott says of the country surgeon is too true, that he is 
worse fed and harder wrought than anyone else in the parish, ex- 
cept it be his horse, still, to a man like Vaughan, to whom the love 
of nature and its scrutiny was a constant passion, few occupations 
could have furnished ampler and more exquisite manifestations of 
her magnificence and beauty. Many of his finest descriptions give 
quite the notion of their having been composed when going his 
rounds on his Welsh pony among the glens and hills and their un- 
speakable solitudes." The distinctively Welsh character of the 
hinted scenery in the poems will be marked by all readers. Hills 
and vales, waterfalls and quiet lakes, mists on the mountain sides, 
heavy passionate showers that leave skies of incomparable fresh- 
ness, and the rare atmospheric beauty of dawns and sunsets — for 
these the Silurist was in debt to the peculiarities of his native land- 
scape. Above all he loved the morning. "Mornings are mysteries," 
he writes in Rules and Lessons. 

In a translation from Guevara's "The Praise and Happiness 
of the Country Life," the Silurist gives a picture of the pious life 
of the country-side, no less an ideal of the hill towns of Spain than 
of the hill towns of Brecknockshire. "The inhabitants of the coun- 
try meet with nothing all the week that can make them miserable, 
and when the sabbath comes or other festival solemnities they en- 
joy a more sincere and heavenly comfort than those that live in 
cities and courts. For such a troop of intricate and numerous nego- 



6 The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 

tiations take up the thoughts and souls of those people that they 
never make any difference betwixt working and holy days. O what 
a pious and beautiful work it is when holy and solemn days are 
observed in the country, according to the sacred rules and ordin- 
ances of religion!" 

So Vaughan passed his life in service, worship and retirement. 
He seems never to have broken the quiet of his country life to go 
up to London and to urge the republication of the Silex Scintillans 
of 1655. He evidently believed rather in living well than in adver- 
tising well living. He must have perceived his cause too great a one 
to be dependent upon the immortality of his own art. (His art was 
indeed practically forgotten long before his own death, remaining 
in oblivion for more than an hundred years, and was by Lyte first 
made accessible as an English classic within the lifetime of some 
now living.) The poet's first wife appears to have died between 
the publication of the first and second editions of the Silex Scintil- 
lans. His second wife was his first wife's sister. He had two sons 
and several daughters. At the age of seventy-three, in the latter 
part of April 1695, he died in Brodnock, only a few miles from his 
birthplace. His epitaph, apparently of his own composition, is our 
best epitome of his thought. At the foot of his tombstone are the 
words, Glorias Miserere. "Glory to God! Have Mercy Upon Me!" 
* Worship is to Vaughan the supreme fact of life, and true wor- 
ship is the distant intimation of God. To labor patiently in sup- 
plying man's obvious wants and in relieving man's obvious suffer- 
ings is Christ's second injunction. But his first injunction is repre- 
sented by the Gloria of Vaughan's epitaph. The necessary load of 
life Vaughan bears without complaint. 

When the world's up and every swarm abroad, 
Keep thou thy temper; mix not with each clay; 
Dispatch necessities; life hath a load 
Which must be carried on, and safely may. 
Yet keep those cares without thee, let the heart 
Be God's alone, and choose the better part. 

The first commandment in Vaughan's religion, then, is worship, 
defined as a sense for the intimations of the divine. The poet 
finds in nature and in the heart of man strange foreshadowings of 
a nobler life somewhere to be, and of a God in whom truth rests, 
Vaughan might have written the lines of Francis Thompson: 



The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 7 

I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; 

But ever and anon a trumpet sounds 

From the hid battlements of Eternity, 

Those shaken mists a while unsettle, then 

Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again- 

In Vaughan's poetry is that most dramatic and mysterious of 
all aesthetic moments, the hush before the discovery. In his rigorous 
adherence to this attitude of worship rests his chief distinction. He 
is severely a poet of intimations. The visionary splendor of heaven 
wholly revealed, as in the typical poetry of Asiatic mystics, is 
totally missing in Vaughan. He will not take us into the gardens of 
heaven, but from a station amidst the obscurities of earth he bows 
and trembles. The more Asiatic aspects of Christianity, as the doc- 
trine of the hierarchies of the angels, are not to be found in 
Vaughan. Neither does he attempt to unriddle divine things with 
metaphysical subtleties, as did so many of the theologians of his 
own day, or his contemporary, the poet Traherne. All Vaughan's 
poetry is the poetry of the wonder that is expectancy. He is in- 
nocent of all pride of logic or imagination. He wonders what if 
such beauty and truth may be found in imperfection may be the 
ultimate perfection of beauty and truth. He imagines himself as 
the cock that feels the yet invisible dawn. He figures our inspira- 
tions as the distant spires of that city we all are travelling to, 
Earth's light is heaven's shadow. Here is neither the concrete 
dogma of medievalism nor the equally hard abstractions of eigh- 
teenth century metaphysics. The spirit of platonism is reduced to 
its essential terms. Here is in theology the psychology of the Ro- 
mantic movement without Romantic cynicism. Furthermore, to sup- 
port him in his attitude of humility toward divine things, Vaughan 
has a lively faith in the orthodox doctrine of shame, the Miserere 
of the epitaph. Only the truly miserable know the supreme joy of 
worship. God is known only by one who recognizes the dimness of 
his own vision. Not that God is dim, but that man is in darkness 
and cannot see him in his clarity. The poet who prays that he may 
dwell invisibly in God is not an obscurantist. True life Vaughan 
describes in Quickness as a "knowing joy". To dwell invisibly in 
God would be to dwell, invisible to man, in the radiance of divine 
truth. 

The doctrine of Miserere, so important in Vaughan's concep- 
tion of worship, is none the less universal for being at present too 



8 The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 

often forgotten. No man can worship truly without humbling him- 
self in the dust. Those who soar up into the circle of eternal light 
not only sing but weep (The World). The earth is most beautiful 
after a rain. The soul is fairest after a private recognition of its 
immeasurable short-comings of the ideal {The Shower). Men who 
are unaware of man's tragic madness are drunkards unaware of 
their own filthiness {The Rainbow). Sometimes Vaughan is bitterly 
personal as in The Timber, sometimes impersonal as in The World. 
In the first case the poet is ashamed, in the second the world is 
shamed. 

In Vaughan's prose, too, is the same thought. "And now, O my 
God, seeing I am but dust and ashes, and my righteousness a filthy 
rag, having no deserts in myself but what should draw everlasting 
vengeance and the vials of thy wrath upon my body and soul, be- 
hold I have brought with me thy first born, and only begotten, the 
propitiation for my sins . . . and for the righteousness of thy Son 
forgive the sins of thy servant." He speaks elsewhere of "the pil- 
grimage and peregrination of many other saints, who wandered 
in deserts and mountains, of whom this world was not worthy." 

A necessary condition of man's purer worship is a knowledge 
of man's humiliation. And worship in turn not only fills man with 
joy at the realization of unwonted splendor, but with remorse at 
the contrast with his own darkness. The relation is reciprocal. So 
in the highly original conclusion of the poem entitled The Shep- 
herds, Vaughan imagines the shepherds at the manger struck with 
a tragic realization of their own wretchedness. So the conclusion of 
great music — psychologically so similar to Vaughan's poetry — fills 
us at once with delight and despair. Vaughan's philosophy is not 
divided within itself. Gloria and Miserere are one, and interpreted 
by the poet with much precision and acuteness. 

It remains, however, to consider the provocations of Vaughan's 
worship, and some of his ideas of life most intimately allied to it. 
He differs from Herbert in that his chief provocation to worship is 
in nature, but, unlike the more pantheistic Wordsworth, he views 
nature at all times with the eye of the Christian. Vaughn's philo- 
sophy, as he repeatedly declares, is best adapted to country livers. 
He does not wonder that Abraham is numbered among them. 



The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 9 

Fresh fields and woods, the Earth's fair face, 
God's foot-stool and man's dwelling place, 
I ask not why the first believer 
Did love to be a country liver. 

Vaughan is profoundly orthodox, but he rarely treats the ritual 
of the Church, and then in by no means his most effective verse. 
Partly from social experience, still more from the Biblical narra- 
tives, but most of all through nature, Vaughan derives his intima- 
tions of divine things. 

When on some gilded cloud or flower 
My gazing soul would dwell an hour, 
And in those weaker glories spy 
Some shadows of eternity. 

Vaughan's greatest religious experience is always to a marked 
degree personal and individualistic. For him, a most loyal son 
of the Church, Christ was worshipped best without the walls of 
the churches. 

To the wild woods will I be gone 
And the coarse meals of great Saint John. 

The poet saw nothing unnatural in this. His devotion, like that 
of Saint John, was too strong to require frequent aid from others. 
In verses that reconcile with high sublimity the subtlest touches of 
fancy and elfin humor, the poet pictures the meeting at night of 
Nicodemus and Christ. 

No mercy-seat of gold, 
No dead and dusty cherub, nor carved stone, 
But his own living works did my Lord hold 
And lodge alone ; 
Where trees and herbs did watch and peep 
And wonder, while the Jews did sleep. 

4 

Vaughan as a worshipper is a lover of nature and an individualist. 
We have seen that Vaughan was not a recluse. No more is 
he an ascetic. The medieval dualism was largely between flesh 
the spirit, the flesh evil and the spirit good. Vaughan's dualism, 
which is expressed in his epitaph, is between actual and possible, 
the misery of earth and the glory of God. In the Silex Scintillans 



10 The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 

the poet never condemns the natural pleasures of the body. His 
choice in translating the life of Paulinus and his wife Therasia 
is significant here. One recalls how natural and beautiful are 
such poems as Isaac's Marriage and Saint Mary Magdalen. As 
a physician he tended to man's physical welfare. His earlier prose 
and verse contains, it is true, a few conventional mortuary passages, 
as the lines, The Charnel. But even in his Mount of Olives he 
writes: "Thou gavest me health and I took no notice of thy gift, 
and but very little of the giver. Thou gavest me days of gladness 
and I numbered them not." No man has confessed to a greater 
enjoyment of the physical universe. In no case is Vaughan afraid 
of pleasure as such. He, no less than the courtiers, held that the 
best man may know moments of the greatest possible happiness. 
He differs only as to the place of that happiness. In a striking 
image in Resignation he declares that he has weighed the joys and 
sorrows of the worldly life, and found the joys more burdensome. 
He believes in simplicity. Some place happiness in tinsel and 
pride, he in a smooth life of retirement and toil, exalted by worship, 
where the worshipper is alone with nature in her silent places. 
The Seed Growing Secretly is a typical poem stressing the superior 
happiness of a life of humbleness and devotion. In The Ornament 
he boldly declares that when the prosaic world catches only a 
glimpse of this life the prosaic world itself will confess this life 
fairest — or, in Vaughan's subtle and paradoxial Elizabethanism, 
"bravest." Vaughan is decidely unlike those medievalists whose 
descendants are the Puritans. He is more likely to prove sympa- 
thetic to a modern reader. 

Vaughan's attitude of hush and expectancy of course led him 
to think much of immortality. Not only did nature give intima- 
tions of infinitely purer and more joyous life than man had as 
yet realized, but, without dogmatic formulae to impair romantic 
wonder, Vaughan held that his own soul would soon issue, beyond 
communication with mankind, into a higher state of being, acording 
to God's providence. Vaughan accepted his lot on earth as a 
part of the same inscrutable providence. He never threw over 
life's burdens or even in poetic fancy aspired with Milton to the 
hairy gown and mossy cell. He held that his way of life, humble, 
serviceable and devout, afforded man his greatest possible happi- 
ness. But, although resigned to these earthly duties and observ- 
ances, he at times grew impatient, as a child, for the joy which 



The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 11 

was to follow death. A part of his worship became the worship 
of immortality. This is most notable in such poems as, "They 
are all gone into the world of light," "I walkt the other day (to 
spend my hour)," and Death. His religious expectancy also looks 
toward a day of revelation, as in The Dawning and Corruption, and 
toward a day of retribution, as in The Rainbow. 

If neither Vaughan's belief that much of his contemporary life 
was idle vanity and that a future world was to afford a greater 
joy than the present, may be said to show a negative view of life, 
no more may his pacifism and his praise of childhood. The world 
understands both of these orthodox ideas better to-day than in the 
time of Vaughan. Medieval poets, as the author of Pearl, praised 
children more for freedom of vice than for any possession of virtue. 
Vaughan's praise of childhood is metaphorical, not literal. He is 
praising, not infants nor intellectual immaturity, but an innocence 
of spirit thoroughly consistent with his own highly subtle and 
rationalistic mind. He aspires to the ingenuousness of children, 
to their innocence of the corrupting world, and to their free and 
spontaneous delights. He would not have man always a child, 
but declares that he must be a child twice who would see God's 
face. This is akin to the orthodox doctrine that Paradise, or the 
state of freedom and innocence, stands at the beginning and at the 
end of the world. Vaughan would at last "by mere playing go to 
heaven." He does not, it is true, belong to those moralists who 
combat what they conceive to be evil with force, nor even with de- 
nunciation. He is neither a Saint Louis nor a Savonarola. He is 
a follower of the injunction, resist not evil. He is rarely a satirist, 
but, if one looks more deeply, often a humorist. From Welsh 
Brecknockshire he smiles upon London, with the assurance that 
the more people there are like himself in retirement in Brecknock 
the sooner London will turn from its futilities. Vaughan is amused 
at London. But to publish his amusement broadcast would be to 
lose it. Accordingly he will in Brecknockshire write poems on 
childhood, and critics in London will declare him sunk in the last 
puerilities of Romanticism. The author of the Introduction to 
Vaughan in The Muses Library frankly declares Palm-Sunday 
ridiculous. Vaughan knew that it is not the subtlest humor to 
declare one's intellectual enemy ridiculous. The subtlest humor is 
often to say nothing whatever on the subject. At any rate, there 
are more who understand Vaughan's poems on peace and child- 



— — 



12 The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 

hood to-day than when he wrote them. And one point may be 
categorically insisted on. The latter are not upon children. 

The final point which I wish to make in regard to Vaughan's 
philosophy is negative. In spite of his tendency toward the non- 
resistance of evil, he is not a quietist. His poem Man, it will be 
observed, describes many natural objects which convey the idea of 
repose, while man is like a restless shuttle rushing through vast 
and constant looms. This condition God has ordained. Eternity 
is contrary to Mutability. Mind in another state will find a certain 
degree of satisfaction and fixity of worship, and hence a measure 
of repose. But no such consummation may rightfully be expected 
by man as man. He may not be passive in respect to God. He 
must struggle and sweat no less for his worship than for his bread. 
Though God struggles to win man, man must also struggle toward 
God. Although the ultimate motion is with God, the preliminary 
motion is with man, who must rid his eyes of the mote which keeps 
out God's light. And worship no less than activity demands, as 
Vaughan's art may illustrate, a highly developed intelligence. 
Vaughan desires a simpler society, but a more acute and intelligent 
mankind. His own profession requires much intelligence and a 
tireless activity. And though Vaughan's philosophy is primarily 
a philosophy of worship, it also determines the active life. The 
active life is not denied by Vaughan, but chastened. In The 
Dawning he prays that at God's coming his soul may be found not 
a stagnant pool, but a busy spring of running water, where all who 
drink may find refreshment. Vaughan would wrestle with God and 
be compassionate toward men. 

Vaughan is immeasurably the greater for having found for his 
philosophy imagination and art. He is profoundly imaginative, 
robed and crowned with Nature. He shows masterful technique 
in organization, versification and language. And though this tech- 
nique is highly deliberative, he has too much passion ever to become 
cold. In considering the organization of his poems one must keep 
carefully in mind the didactic intentions, and be prepared for an 
unmechanical but subtle and flower-like structure. The poet's 
technique is no less modern than his romantic wonder. 

Although Vaughan has been repeatedly declared the author 
of great lines but scarcely of great poems, and although nearly 
three-quarters of the selections from Vaughan in the anthologies 
are truncated or otherwise mutilated, remarkable powers of organi- 



The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 13 

zntion may, I think, safely be ascribed to him. Anthologists have 
admired his images from nature, with which, for example, The 
World, The Timber and The Rainbow are introduced, and seem- 
ingly missed the still more searching descriptions of life which 
these images are later understood to contain. Anthologists might 
better have omitted altogether poems which they either did not 
understand or were unwilling to present in their true sense. To dis- 
cuss with any approximate justice to the poet the remarkable or- 
ganization and beautiful and subtle conclusions of his poems would 
require many score of pages. The World, so miserably truncated 
in the anthologies to a fragment of the first strophe, is perhaps the 
simplest illustration of Vaughan's frequent and highly original 
use of the tripartite form in poetry. 

The poet imagines a ring of light and the world and her train 
swirled beneath in the ignoble shadow. The poem itself is a ring. 
The first stanza begins: 

I saw Eternity the other night 
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light 
All calm as it was bright. 

The fourth stanza (for even here Vaughan does not allow his plan 
to be obvious) begins: 

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing, 
And sing and weep, soar'd up into the Ring, 
But most would use no wing. 

The poem concludes: 

But as I did their madness so discuss, 

One whispered thus, 
This Ring the Bridegroom did for none provide 

But for his bride. 

The World is not particularly musical in jits words, but has a 
profound musical unity in the ordering of its thought. The en- 
veloping passages on eternity are struck out in slow chords and in 
a solemn major stride. The satire upon the world, which forms the 
body of the poem, is itself varied from sharp, fantastical, humming 
dissonants to a restrained but passionate and ominous minor. Yet 
no one can confuse this indignant passage with the sublime passages 



14 The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 

which encompass it. No more rigorously constructed lyric may be 
found among the English classics. The tripartite form is more subtly 
used in Abel's Blood, The Rainbow and The Palm-Tree. 

Transitions of mood in Vaughan are daring but calculated. 
He achieves the wanton heed and giddy cunning which modern 
music so often strives for. His imagination passes from the shell 
to the sea, and from the sea to the shell. Even in his most affecting 
religious poems he shows himself of the age of Fuller, Walton and 
Browne by introducing with perfect taste a seemingly naive and 
subtle humor. So in Isaac's Marriage, The Ornament, Palm-Sun- 
day, Saint Mary Magdalen, even, as we have seen, in that most 
sublime of all his imaginings, The Night. But if Vaughan's humor 
is broadly of his age, viewed more closely, it is his own. It is 
evidence of his faith in his philosophy, his restraint in his art, 
and in its complete sanity differs decisively from the exuberant 
humor of such a mystic as Blake. Vaughan takes a cautious free- 
dom with mood and form. The elemental imagery in such a poem 
as, "They are all gone into the world of light," will appeal to 
all readers. But in the radical transitions of The World, Abel's 
Blood, The Rainbow, The Dawning, and above all in Palm-Sunday, 
Vaughan does what modern artists attempt and does it conspicuously 
well. But he offers both types. There is no more classically con- 
structed lyric in English than The Ornament. 

The poet's irregular meters and broken phrases do not indicate 
a want of skill in versification. He must have lingered with loving 
devotion over the metrical felicities of his art. In The Retreat, 
for example, he shows that, like Donne, he can, when the occasion 
demands, write with the utmost smoothness. The verse of Cock- 
Crowing has a rapturous movement, while that of The Night is 
equally smooth and sublime. In the few instances in which he 
attempts to represent physical movement in sound he is notably 
successful. Thus the sigh of release in the last line of the first 
stanza of The Shower conveys, after the restraint of the preceding 
lines, the descent of the shower which the words describe. There 
is simply no passage in the familiar meter of Abel's Blood with 
such a rush of poetical afflatus as the first twenty-two lines of 
this poem. The dramatic realism and imeptuous grief of the lyric 
beginning, "Come, come, what do I here," are, in their kind, unex- 
celled. In Abel's Blood, The Dawning and elsewhere, Vaughan aids 
an effect of astonishment or marks a transition by the unexpected 
short line. But difficult stanzaic forms are often richly rewarding. 



The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 15 

Where the poet's thought is deep and his language close, his 
versification makes slowness of movement no less beautiful than 
swiftness. So in the flood of earnest moonlight which breathes 
in Quickness. He commands an unusually stately and moving 
rythm in The World, The Shepherds and Corruption. But the 
chief secret of beautiful versification in reflective poetry is the art 
of unobvious variation in a given meter to express more fully the 
subtleties of the thought. So The Palm-Tree is rythmically one 
of the subtlest of all Vaughan's poems, though the verse scheme 
is wholly unassuming. 

One cannot insist too strongly on the additional meaning which 
all Vaughan's poetry receives when read aloud. With such a poem 
as Death this becomes a necessity. The solemn movement; the 
hovering accents; the short second line of each stanza, here with 
less of emphasis than repose; the full close of each, like a full sigh 
of relief; the whispered stillness; the long, slow movement of the 
lines that link the fifth strophe to the last; the last of the short 
lines, which tells the burden of the entire poem; the long, frequent, 
cunningly distributed pauses, preparing the way for the restful 
conclusion — these are such achievements as all students of poetry 
as art will observe, for through them we are mysteriously made one 
with a poet's soul. The mood accords with the philosophy. 

Not only has Vaughan a remarkable philosophy cast in lyrics 
of faultless contour and expressed in phrases of the greatest rythmi- 
cal beauty and significance. His workmanship in minor images, 
in phrases of speaking significance and in the choice of words also 
betrays the master. At times, as in Man and The Tempest, he uses 
a learned vocabulary with admirable effect. Generally he astonishes 
by simplicity: "I saw Eternity the other night." He reconciles 
perfect dignity with almost colloquial ease, as in lines in The 
Shepherds which describe Bethlehem's humble cots stepping above 
the ruined palaces of Salem. A single phrase in Vaughan may 
have more light in it than whole poems of authors more often but 
less profitably read. Grosart called Vaughan's fragments aurea 
grana, but the image would better have fitted the words themselves 
in Vaughan's chief poems. His imagination, as in Corruption, is 
amazingly vivid ; meaning is packed, and ornament sparse, Such 
writing is equally exacting of the poet and of the reader. The 
effect is a d|s^ipjmed^mjpres_sianisnu- Vaughan can strike a blow 
without a quiver. 

At the highest Vaughan's art, temper and philosophy are one. 



16 The Tercentenary of Henry Vaughan 

He stands like the pinnacle of a shining mountain outlined against 
the stars — motionless, symbolical, divine. His light is a sword 
against mere aestheticism and the world's sentimentalities. Yet 
his light is tender. He is the ancient paradox of sweetness and 
strength. Even the matchless Orinda recognized the "charming 
rigor" of his mind and art. As a Welsh country physician he 
lived a life that gave fortitude to the body and made the mind 
compassionate. In constant communion with nature, he learnt her 
meanings of delicacy and strength. Vaughan thought clearly and 
deeply and knew what in life he sought. The mirth and peace of 
children, the faith of friends, patience, kindness, all joys that are 
calm and smooth and bright, the freedom of the soul, a knowledge 
of man's wretchedness, nature's beauty and her sternness, and, 
through mankind and nature, the love of God — in these Vaughan 
lived. His three greatest loves, the love of art, the love of nature 
and the love of Christ, are ensphered in his poetry as one. 



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